notes on interesting digital ephemera

December 09, 2016

An Economic Geography of the United States: From Commutes to Megaregions

Garrett Dash Nelson1, Alasdair Rae2*

1 Department of Geography and Society of Fellows, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, United States of America, 2 Department of Urban Studies and Planning, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom

Abstract

The emergence in the United States of large-scale “megaregions” centered on major metro- politan areas is a phenomenon often taken for granted in both scholarly studies and popular accounts of contemporary economic geography. This paper uses a data set of more than 4,000,000 commuter flows as the basis for an empirical approach to the identification of such megaregions. We compare a method which uses a visual heuristic for understanding areal aggregation to a method which uses a computational partitioning algorithm, and we reflect upon the strengths and limitations of both. We discuss how choices about input parameters and scale of analysis can lead to different results, and stress the importance of comparing computational results with “common sense” interpretations of geographic coher- ence. The results provide a new perspective on the functional economic geography of the United States from a megaregion perspective, and shed light on the old geographic problem of the division of space into areal units.

December 08, 2016

Trump will push for change... but it wasn't trade that removed American manufacturing jobs, rather automation erased them.. 80 to 90% by estimates. This Brookings piece uses an 85% estimate. The automation trend will accelerate. It has already moved into white collar sectors and will be huge (sorry for the word) in ten to fifteen years. We saw enormous displacements like this through the Industrial Revolution... it took five or six generations for them to settle down.

I scraped the trackers on these sites and I was absolutely dumbfounded. Every time someone likes one of these posts on Facebook or visits one of these websites, the scripts are then following you around the web. And this enables data-mining and influencing companies like Cambridge Analytica to precisely target individuals, to follow them around the web, and to send them highly personalised political messages. This is a propaganda machine. It’s targeting people individually to recruit them to an idea. It’s a level of social engineering that I’ve never seen before.

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Cambridge Analytica, an American-owned company based in London, was employed by both the Vote Leave campaign and the Trump campaign. Dominic Cummings, the campaign director of Vote Leave, has made few public announcements since the Brexit referendum but he did say this: “If you want to make big improvements in communication, my advice is – hire physicists.”

Steve Bannon, founder of Breitbart News and the newly appointed chief strategist to Trump, is on Cambridge Analytica’s board and it has emerged that the company is in talks to undertake political messaging work for the Trump administration. It claims to have built psychological profiles using 5,000 separate pieces of data on 220 million American voters. It knows their quirks and nuances and daily habits and can target them individually.

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Donald Trump is connecting through exactly the same technology platforms that supposedly helped fuel the Arab spring; connecting to racists and xenophobes. And Facebook and Google are amplifying and spreading that message. And us too – the mainstream media. Our outrage is just another node on Jonathan Albright’s data map.

“The more we argue with them, the more they know about us,” he says. “It all feeds into a circular system. What we’re seeing here is new era of network propaganda.”

We are all points on that map. And our complicity, our credulity, being consumers not concerned citizens, is an essential part of that process. And what happens next is down to us. “I would say that everybody has been really naive and we need to reset ourselves to a much more cynical place and proceed on that basis,” is Rebecca MacKinnon’s advice. “There is no doubt that where we are now is a very bad place. But it’s we as a society who have jointly created this problem. And if we want to get to a better place, when it comes to having an information ecosystem that serves human rights and democracy instead of destroying it, we have to share responsibility for that.”

Are Jews evil? How do you want that question answered? This is our internet. Not Google’s. Not Facebook’s. Not rightwing propagandists. And we’re the only ones who can reclaim it.

December 04, 2016

Having important devices on the Internet is becoming increasing hazardous - heating in some Finnish buildings failed. With a good chance the US is moving towards being a provocative state and the ease of such attacks it makes sense to consider what items you have that have a connection.

November 28, 2016

There's a lot of speculation and misinformation on the so called gig economy. A few solid, but mostly qualitative studies have been done, but now the Pew Center has released a large quantitative study. If you have any interest in the area it is worth the read.